Image courtesy of Despair, Inc. Go over and buy something nice for yourself.
I spend a lot of time on the phone. But I’m not a fool: as much of my phone-talking as possible is done when the magical “whenever minutes” meter stops, so I don’t get charged. I’m rather careful about this, as I don’t like paying anything over the already outrageous monthly blood money T-Mobile collects from me.
So you can imagine my displeasure upon seeing that T-Mobile had me billed this month for 1004 “whenever minutes”. (Someone in marketing surely got a bonus for that meaningless term.) So I took the time to log all 327 calls from the period and total up the calls made outside of the nighttime minutes. I came up with 647 minutes, as I knew I would. Now I was on a warpath. I called up good ol’ 611 and prepared to have a .002 cents conversation.
I’ll derail a bit here and say something here about phone support: I hate calling support for nearly any company. I often end up talking to uncooperative, unmotivated people, sometimes who are barely intelligible.
Sometimes it's easier to just build a new track.
I’ll derail again and mention that I have no problem understanding most non-native English speakers. I have no issue with the fact that companies can save huge amounts of money by outsourcing support to India and such. I have no issues talking to an Indian, a Filipino, or anyone else, provided they actually can speak the English language. Minor differences in pronunciation and the occasional pause to reflect and choose the correct words are no problem at all for me.
I have respect for anyone who can speak multiple languages, and it’s no trouble to “bear with them”. But if your enunciation or vocabulary is so limited or just wrong that I cannot understand you, you can’t help me. I have had this problem with people both in and out of my country. It makes me cringe. If you can’t speak well enough to be reasonably and widely understood by other English speakers, then you can’t really serve English-speaking customers. That’s a simple statement of fact. Multinational corporations, take note.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, so I make the call, jump through the phone maze and… sorry, I have to derail once more and mention how much I hate phone prompts. Again, I’ll try to be reasonable here: it saves a lot of money for an organization to have a computerized system to guide people to the correct department, handle trivial tasks like accepting payments, etc. I don’t have a problem with that, really, especially since the voice recognition capabilities have improved so much in recent years.
*Not an actual phone maze. Actual phone mazes don't look as fun to run around in.
The real problem is that you dial and/or speak all this information to the computer, only to be transferred over to a human who asks for all the same information again. That doesn’t work. Why should I have to waste time with a computer if my answers aren’t going to carry over to the representative who needs it? We’ve had speech recognition technology since 1952, so surely sometime between then and now someone has come up with some kind of clever “take that thing I just told the bloody computer and put it on your screen” system. Of course they have. But to look at many phone mazes, you wouldn’t think so.
Okay, we’re through the derailment. Dust off your coat sleeves, pick up your luggage and please catch the incoming train to The Point. To resume the story, I gave a call in to 611, told the computer what’s what, and after a few seconds of unbearable advertisements a representative picked up. He spoke English (English I say!), knew my phone number and the other smattering of info I had told the computer through gritted teeth, and listened attentively to my issue. I told him how the system reported I had used 1004 “whenever” minutes already, how I was quite sure I hadn’t, and had taken the pains to verify that with their own information, and how with 12 days still in the billing cycle, I wasn’t savoring the idea of paying even further overage fees.
As he started looking into it, I revealed my grand theory. In my keen observations I had noticed the large bold text at the bottom stating all times were in PST. Except they weren’t: the times in the logs were my time, God’s own Eastern Standard. Could this mean, perhaps, that they were charging the calls against a time zone three hours behind mine? That would push many nighttime calls onto the sacred “whenever minutes” ground.
And I was right, as it happened. After a few minutes of reviewing and hunting on his end, the representative agreed with my theory. A very few minutes more and he had my account credited 400 minutes, with all fees reversed.
On second thought, this would make a pretty boring Twilight Zone episode. "The Day Customer Service Worked"
I was still in shock when I hung up. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen! I’m supposed to have to argue, wait, wait some more, ask for a supervisor, yell, cry, write angry letters, and not get anywhere! What kind of madness is this? What went wrong right?
It’s simple. Someone did his job. He cared enough to actually do what he is paid to do, and that’s listen to the problem, look into it, and come up with a resolution that is in the best interests of his company. It so happens that their best interests are to keep me feeding them money, so he made things right, and did so in what I imagine is the most simple way for everyone involved.
Why doesn’t this happen all the time? I suspect it comes down more to the individual you end up with than it does corporate policy. For all the nonsense and bureaucracy that plagues any large company, they still want to make money, and that means finding a way to appease the customer as cheaply as possible. It can (and often does) cost a company more to deal with the ramifications of telling some poor chump to get bent than it does to take care of the poor chap’s problem, most especially when it’s the company’s fault to begin with.
It’s very likely there are a number of cases where the representative’s hands are tied, and they just can’t satisfy the customer because corporate policy prevents them. I’m not even talking about where the customer is wrong or trying to game the system, I mean where the right thing should be done, but no one with enough authority is available to make it happen.
I doubt these cases happen all that often, though. From being on all sides and levels of the customer service fence, I can attest that it’s usually possible to come up with a solution, it might just involve more work than a representative cares to apply. The temptation is to put all of the fault of lousy customer service on the company: they really ought to hire better employees!
While this is mostly true, at what point do we hold the individual responsible for their own shoddy work ethics? For every representative at T-Mobile like the one I spoke with today, there’s very likely two or three lousy ones. T-Mobile needs to know about who is and isn’t doing their job, and they need to hold responsible those not doing what they should. But each individual should be responsible enough themselves to do what they should, anyway, don’t you think?
I would venture to say the world would be a better and more useful place if people just did their job, or, if they didn’t want to do their job, just quit. We have a God-given right to pursue happiness, not a grant of happiness where ever we might be at the moment. I don’t think those lousy representatives recognize this.
